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“The challenges we face as a party and a country are real,” a smiling Clinton said. “So now more than ever, we need to stay engaged in the field and online, reaching out to new voters, young people and everyone who wants a better, stronger, fairer America.”

This could be acceptable if it was only rallying the troops for next year. That is not all that is happening.

Last year, before the election, a “Dossier” was assembled with the aid of a British former agent and a company formed by several former reporters called “Fusion GPS”

Russia may have been trying to undermine Trump. And it may have done so in collusion with the Democrats. The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel noted Thursday that Fusion GPS has ties to the Democrats — and will not reveal who paid it for the dossier. Strassel asked: “What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign?” The money could have passed through intermediaries, she added.

That means the real story of collusion in the 2016 election could be that Democrats were working with Russia. And that would make sense, given their long history of appeasing the Russians, under both Clinton and Barack Obama.

It appears that Fusion GPS may have paid reporters in addition to providing the ludicrous “Dossier” for their titillation with anti-Trump myths.

CNN reported the secret FISA warrant was obtained after Manafort became the subject of the FBI investigation that began as early as 2014 under then FBI Director James Comey, and centered upon work Manafort conducted consulting with Ukraine.

Now Manafort and the FBI investigation of him has nothing to do with any theory of Russian “collusion.”

The Fusion GPS saga isn’t over. The Clinton-DNC funding is but a first glimpse into the shady election doings concealed within that oppo-research firm’s walls. We now know where Fusion got some of its cash, but the next question is how the firm used it. With whom did it work beyond former British spy Christopher Steele ? Whom did it pay? Who else was paying it?

The answers are in Fusion’s bank records. Fusion has doggedly refused to divulge the names of its clients for months now, despite extraordinary pressure. So why did the firm suddenly insist that middleman law firm Perkins Coie release Fusion from confidentiality agreements, and spill the beans on who hired it?

For all practical purposes, the collusion probe is over. While the “counterintelligence” cover will continue to be exploited so that no jurisdictional limits are placed on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, this is now an obstruction investigation. 3.) That means it is, as it has always been, an impeachment investigation.

NBC’s Chuck Todd pressed Feinstein as if it were obvious that the president had obstructed justice. He based his claim on a memorandum by former national security aide K. T. McFarland, who wrote during the transition that Russia “has just thrown U.S.A. election to him,” though in context it was clear she was referring, half-mockingly, to claims by the Democratic Party.

He also cited a tweet by Trump on Saturday, where the president said, “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” which Democrats cited as proof of obstruction — though there was no evidence that Trump had tried to stop the investigation into Flynn even if he knew his crime.

Special counsel Robert Mueller removed one of the FBI’s top Russian counterintelligence experts from his team of investigators after an internal investigation found messages he sent that could be interpreted as showing political bias for Hillary Clinton and against President Donald Trump, according to US officials briefed on the matter.

Peter Strzok, who led the investigation of the Hillary Clinton email server as the No. 2 official in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, left the Mueller team this past summer, multiple sources said.

Does that suggest anything ?

The messages from Strzok to another FBI expert assigned to the Mueller team were discovered in the course of that internal review. The wording of the messages sent during the 2016 campaign appeared to be making fun of then-candidate Trump, and raised concerns that they could be seen as being pro-Clinton, the sources said.
Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer who was assigned to the Mueller investigation, received the messages. Page returned to the FBI earlier this summer.

Any powers can be abused. When executive powers are abused, Congress retains the constitutional authority to impeach and remove the president. Obstruction of an FBI investigation may not be realistically prosecutable in court, but there is congressional precedent — in the Nixon and Clinton situations — for obstruction to be a “high crime and misdemeanor” triggering impeachment. Undoubtedly, abuse of the pardon power would also be an impeachable offense, even though it is not reviewable by the courts. I continue to believe that this is the real danger for President Trump: A report by the special counsel, either through the grand jury or some other vehicle, concluding (a) that the president had obstructed the FBI’s investigation of Flynn and of Trump-campaign collusion with Russia, and (b) recommending that the matter be referred to Congress for consideration of next steps, potentially including impeachment and removal.

The Democrats seem to be banking on a possible impeachment. Even if they could not get the Senate to convict, unlikely to have a Democrat majority any time soon, a House resolution of impeachment would be sweet revenge for Bill Clinton.

That seems to be where this is going. They managed to pull it off with Richard Nixon in 1974, but Trump is an entirely different person and the times are different. The FBI was neck deep in that operation, too, of course.

Only a real suicide wish by the GOP would being such a result and that cannot be ruled out these days.

40 Responses to “The Attempted Trump Coup”

I think the “guilty” plea tells us more about the Mueller investigation, and about the politicization of “justice” more generally, than it does about presumed malefactions by the retired general.

I think that Gen. Flynn admitted guilt in order to stop the pain for himself and his family.

I doubt Flynn — or Mueller, for that matter — believes he misled government officials.

Flynn may have been confused (his conversation with Pence apparently took place in the middle of the night with very bad communications), but he certainly had no need to lie about the Kislyak conversations. I think Flynn copped a plea to end the torture, and to save his family from prosecution.

It is notable that Mueller and company have apparently dropped their investigation of Gen. Flynn’s son, and the plea agreement will dramatically reduce the family’s legal expenses.

According to another source, with direct knowledge of the Jan. 24 interview, McCabe had contacted Flynn by phone directly at the White House. White House officials had spent the “earlier part of the week with the FBI overseeing training and security measures associated with their new roles so it was no surprise to Flynn that McCabe had called,” the source said.

McCabe told Flynn “some agents were heading over (to the White House) but Flynn thought it was part of the routine work the FBI had been doing and said they would be cleared at the gate,” the source said.

“It wasn’t until after they were already in (Flynn’s) office that he realized he was being formally interviewed. He didn’t have an attorney with him,” they added. Flynn’s attorney Robert Kelner did not respond for comment.

Mueller and the deep state are playing a very high stakes game. He’s got about 18-24 months to produce results before the next campaign begins in earnest. Then the deep state and its investigation will become the subject of a very serious political attack as the presidential campaigning starts in earnest. Based on what Mueller’s been able to accomplish thus far, I doubt many minds will be changed and Trump will exact his revenge in the second term. It seems unlikely Breyer, Kennedy, and Ginsburg can all survive to 2023. It’s going to be a very different country if Mueller doesn’t produce results soon.

The potential for a serious consideration of impeachment by the congress is remote at this time given what we know that is factual. The actual effects of all this smoke and mirrors is to distract and diminish Trump and by association, republicans and Trump supporters. To a great extent, it has worked as the congress has been mostly ineffective. Perhaps the shift to obstruction and the passage of tax legislation is the beginning of this moving to just progressive background noise.

I hope so. Obama Care has be given life support rather than a constructive replacement, immigration shoved to the back of the line and the tax “reform” legislation has been reduced to a bandaid for the ’18 election cycle. The staggering issues of unfunded liabilities and the national debt are AWOL. Mission accomplished.

If the special prosecutor [persecutor?] “investigation” grinds to an inconclusive conclusion, Roy Moore prevails and several other congressional progressives announce they won’t be running again, perhaps we can get some better future congressional leadership and legislative results.

As I think about what Trump has been able to accomplish and set in motion, I am very surprised and pleased for the most part. If he had a congress motivated to support him, the results could be astounding and far reaching.

Something to note when viewing this. We were reminded today that Hillary aide Cheryl Mills and Hillary . . . companion Huma Abedin lied directly under oath in the matter of knowledge of Hillary’s secret unsecured server that gave every classified matter in the purview of the State Department to any foreign intelligence service running anything newer than DOS. They know that they lied, because they caught emails from both of them discussing the secret system. They were interviewed by Peter Strzok, who filed the charges against Flynn. Democrats are allowed and encouraged to lie to the FBI when it will help the Democrats.

DEARIEME calls it an attempted coup. It is. And she is right. They will go to assassination next. Keep in mind that the Democrats have already tried a mass assassination to overturn the Congressional elections that was only stopped by the good shooting of two Capitol Police.

Right now, the FBI does not work for the country, does not consider itself subordinate to the Constitution. They work for the DNC.

They consider themselves to be the American incarnation of чрезвычайная коми́ссия по борьбе́ с контрреволюцией и саботажем

Mrs Davis, I expect Kennedy will be replaced soon, but we have to assume Ginsberg will stay until she’s at least 90, maybe longer. I tried doing her workout once, and it’s nothing to sneeze at. The side planks are a monster. She’ll be tormenting us for years if she keeps those wretched exercises up.

Mrs Davis, I expect Kennedy will be replaced soon, but we have to assume Ginsberg will stay until she’s at least 90, maybe longer. I tried doing her workout once, and it’s nothing to sneeze at. The side planks are a monster. She’ll be tormenting us for years if she keeps those wretched exercises up.

Right after the election the war machine was started by Obama and it’s been rolling ever since. The collusion thing so loved by many of these people is not working, as no evidence eventually wins out. Well so far. So they gonna bring him down with fraud of some kind or other. Poor Flynn, seriously caught in the middle, although he was playing both ends of the game. ;)

This is so amazing to watch. The American hype machine has always been real strong and we have a duet now, which is unusual for the US. So, a real war for power on TV every night, has got to be uniting … not.

In other words, it looks like a low-integrity, reckless, biased bureaucrat has played an important role in two of the most important and politically charged criminal investigations of the new century. Yes, it’s good that Mueller removed Strzok when he discovered the text messages. No, Strzok is not solely responsible for the conclusions reached in either investigation. But his mere presence hurts public confidence in the FBI, and it does so in a way that further illustrates a persistent and enduring national problem: America’s permanent bureaucracy is unacceptably partisan.

A point not brought up here.
Strzok was the FBI supervisor removed from the investigation for visible bias.
Strzok was also the agent that interviewed Flynn, and on whose word the accusation of lying to the FBI is based.
Strzok couldn’t possibly testify in court because he was removed for bias, but they pursued a plea before this came out.
We’re in obstruction of justice territory here: against Mueller. This is the kind of violation that gets a prosecutor sanctioned and/or disbarred.

“This is the kind of violation that gets a prosecutor sanctioned and/or disbarred.”

Yes. Someone else brought this up today.

Did the prosecution tell Flynn’s lawyer that their main witness against him was removed for bias? Since Strzok led the interview and his testimony would be needed to establish untruthfulness, he is a critical witness not just a prosecutor. If not disclosed, would this not be a Giglio violation? This is the kind of misconduct that can get a case dismissed and a lawyer disbarred. It is a Constitutional violation. This has bothered me since I heard about it.

The question is [keeping in mind that the Attorney General is a non-participant by his own choice] is whether anyone will call them on their violations. Both the Democrat-Democrat and the Republican-Democrat wings of the UniParty, plus the media, plus all of Federal law enforcement and Intel are working to overturn the election, we are outside the bounds of rule of law.

By the way Mike K the “More keeps coming out about this guy.” link does not work for me.

This is a side story, I guess, but it also shines a less than flattering light on the FBI while Flynn looks like a stand up guy: Limbaugh’s recounting. I remember when Flynn was first on news shows, he had that barely held in emotion that seemed to come from years of anger; this may have been part of it. His Turkey deal appears to taint him, but I always had the feeling of grim tension about him – and it seemed to come from the kind of disillusion at the core of this thread.

In showing Trump the dossier, did Comey think Trump’s reaction would be to a) resign, b) consider himself in thrall to someone who had such “secrets” about him, of c) what? Did Comey think it was the truth? Surely not, but some of these actions do seem those of a group willing to believe anything about Trump.

If this Flynn story was written up as a thriller, it would get rejected for being the fever-swamp delusional rantings of a crazy person. Sure, The Swamp is real, but they’re not this cartoonish, they’d say.

All of this can easily be attributed to the entire Democrat party going completely insane. Except for Flynn apparently lying about sanctions being brought up in his discussions with the Russian ambassador. That’s the part that makes no sense. Why?

There’s a small corner of the interwebs where folks say that Mueller is really on Trump’s side, and is any day now going to release indictments of everyone from the two Podestas to Hillary and her cronies to Obama, Holder, etc. Crazy, I know. In this theory the Flynn plea is meant to enable him to testify about crimes committed by the Obama administration, by releasing him from security restrictions he’d otherwise be under about talking about that stuff. But of course in order to make the theory work, you have to have the plan get hatched a year ago, and he deliberately lies to the FBI to get it all rolling.

Stupid, I know. But certainly no stupider than the idea that 10 years ago Putin either recruited and/or blackmailed Trump into being a Russian agent, and we’re supposed to take that seriously. Oh well.

PS. Hey, remember when that guy killed 50+ people in Las Vegas and they still won’t tell us anything about who he was or why he did it?

As for why Flynn took the plea deal, I think the speculation that it was financial and concern about his son’s legal vulnerability is probably correct. Recall that he was fired for a similar issue regarding his account of these meetings to Pence. His biggest mistake was taking an impromptu interview from the FBI without legal advice and time to gather his wits. I still don’t understand why he just didn’t tell the truth. That could include refusing to answer questions about the topics discussed if he thought the information was too sensitive to share with the FBI, knowing that it would probably be leaked. After all, there is no charge for contempt of FBI or we might all be charged.

They must’ve had some embarrassing dirt on Flynn that they threatened to expose during the trial. There was no other reason to take the plea deal when the case against him was so weak.

It could be that Flynn merely wanted to cap his legal expenses and stop the prosecutorial threats to his son. There was also an implicit threat that in the unlikely event Flynn went to trial the jury would have been drawn from DC voters who would almost all be Democrats. Most people in Flynn’s situation would have done what he did.

Andrew McCarthy’s argument — Flynn plead to lying to federal officials, because Mueller didn’t have evidence to get him on more serious charges — seems likely to be correct.

“The Flynn plea looks more and more like the Ted Stevens case where prosecutors withheld evidence that he was innocent.”

And what happened to the crooks responsible for that?

Nothing.
“Two Justice Department prosecutors who were suspended for withholding evidence during the 2008 corruption trial against former senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) have won their appeals from a federal panel that reviews discipline against civil servants.”

Several years ago, I read “Circle of Treason,” the story of Aldrich Ames, the CIA traitor who destroyed our Soviet network.

Ames was always interested in what others were doing,. That violates the rule of “Need to Know.” When I had a Secret clearance long ago, anyone working on such a project moved into a separate room and others were not welcome there.

This fellow Strzok was involved with every investigation that involved the Clintons or the election. Why ?

Why was he involved in so many investigations ?

Why was the IG looking at his text messages? That is how his bias was uncovered.

“The January 2017 statement issued by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) announcing its review of allegations regarding various actions of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in advance of the 2016 election stated that the OIG review would, among other things, consider whether certain underlying investigative decisions were based on improper considerations and that we also would include issues that might arise during the course of the review.

The OIG has been reviewing allegations involving communications between certain individuals, and will report its findings regarding those allegations promptly upon completion of the review of them.”

Don’t worry about the conspiracy angle. it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy if everyone knows what the objective is and some way to help get there. Coordination is not necessary in that instance. If you buy cats and release them among the mice, you don’t have to train them first.

Comey and Mueller badly bungled the biggest case they ever handled. They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks…the FBI ignored a 2002 tip from a scientific colleague of the actual anthrax killer, who turned out to be a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins; the reason is that they had quickly obsessed on an innocent man named Steven Hatfill; the bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources — a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put her conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill…

Mueller…personally assured Ashcroft and presumably George W. Bush that in Steven Hatfill the bureau had its man. Comey, in turn, was asked by a skeptical Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz if Hatfill was another Richard Jewell — the security guard wrongly accused of the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Comey replied that he was “absolutely certain” they weren’t making a mistake.

Such certitude seems to be Comey’s default position in his professional life. Mueller didn’t exactly distinguish himself with contrition, either. In 2008, after Ivins committed suicide as he was about to be apprehended for his crimes, and the Justice Department had formally exonerated Hatfill — and paid him $5.82 million in a legal settlement — Mueller could not be bothered to walk across the street to attend the press conference announcing the case’s resolution. When reporters did ask him about it, Mueller was graceless. “I do not apologize for any aspect of the investigation,” he said, adding that it would be erroneous “to say there were mistakes.”

I seriously doubt that either Ivins or Hatfill were behind the anthrax attacks. I don’t know who was, but I do know that there were a lot of problems with the theories that either man had the necessary access, skills, or knowledge to do what was done to that anthrax. The FBI got into trouble with the Hatfill investigation, switched to Ivins, and when he committed suicide, he then became the fall guy.

The trouble with the whole issue is that there were some very disturbing things about the actual anthrax attacks that were never satisfactorily answered–Like, how the hell either of the two supposed suspects could have manufactured that stuff without access to a world-class production facility, which Fort Detrick ain’t, at least for that sort of biowarfare material. The guys I knew in the NBC community were all completely at odds with the FBI investigation–At least one LTC I worked around in Iraq was certain that whatever it was, it wasn’t those two. He did up an informal paper that went over the “revealed truth” after Ivins committed suicide, and there wasn’t much left intact from the FBI case when he was done skewering it. It might have looked valid to a layman, but for someone familiar with biowarfare and the Fort Detrick facilities, it was ludicrously full of holes.

That LTC had zero idea what was really going on, but he did say that the way it looked was almost as if someone had used Soviet-style lab and manufacturing techniques and US-available strains of anthrax, in an attempt to create a false-flag effect with the attacks. I asked him what he thought about the idea of either Ivins or Hatfill somehow creating the agents used in the attacks at the labs, clandestinely while doing their regular jobs, and he just laughed hysterically. In his opinion, as someone who’d worked at those facilities, while the security policies and procedures were not perfect, the idea that either Hatfill or Ivins could have done what was necessary to make that stuff was something that only a technically uneducated dunce could even theorize. The refinement of the techniques used to manufacture the agent, the consistency, and a bunch of other stuff all point to something other than a disgruntled lab worker throwing something together on the sly. What, he had no idea, but he found the FBI theories of the crime risible.

I wasn’t aware of the 1986 FBI Miami shootout. Matix took six hits to kill, Platt a dozen. And Mireles? This hero went back on the job, and actually worked with my former battalion commander Colonel (Ret.) Bill Wenger in Afghanistan in the 2000s on assignment there for the FBI. Now that’s a patriot. Now that’s what the real FBI is all about.

When this nonsense is finally exposed as the farce that it is, they should move Strzok out of human resources or wherever he’s hiding now and make him work bank robberies. Maybe he’ll learn how to be a real cop instead of a liberal joke.

“When this nonsense is finally exposed as the farce that it is, they should move Strzok out of human resources or wherever he’s hiding now and make him work bank robberies. Maybe he’ll learn how to be a real cop instead of a liberal joke.”

Would anyone want this guy on your team dealing with bank robbers? He isn’t interested in law enforcement and is permanently bent. I don’t favor any wasted energy or risk involved with rehab efforts on anyone such as Strzok. He needs to be fired and charged. Pus is not redeemable.

Here’s some news I missed.Edward Jay Epstein reported on December 21 that the FBI’s anthrax case has fallen apart. In 2008 the FBI declared that Dr. Bruce Ivins, who died an apparent suicide in July 2008, was the perpetrator who sent anthrax-laced letters to members of Congress and others just days after the September 11 attacks. The FBI’s investigation, apparently the most lengthy it had ever conducted, was directed primarily at scientists who had access to anthrax materials. But, Epstein reports, it turns out that Dr. Ivins did not have access to the sophisticated form of anthrax used in September 2001.

Back in October 2001 I wrote a U.S. News column arguing that a state actor may have been behind the anthrax attacks, and I blogged on the subject twice in September 2006 and again in November 2007. It seemed to me then that the anthrax attacks were overwhelmingly likely to be the product of al Qaeda or another terrorist organization, quite likely aided by a state actor, and that the FBI by concentrating its investigation on domestic scientists had been barking up the wrong tree. The announcement in 2008 that the case was solved and a domestic scientist was responsible seemed to refute my conclusions. Now Epstein’s report that the FBI’s case has fallen apart has me thinking along the same lines as I was from 2001 to 2008.